For many, adventure is defined as driving down the interstate on a Friday evening. But for some rugged men adventure involved much more. Take H. Dayne Kline, who went through two schools before being sent to Jefferson Barracks, at that time the oldest military installation west of the Mississippi, for "overseas" training. While there, President Franklin D. Roosevelt toured his company on April 29, 1943.
Dayne's occupation during World War II was as a crewmember flying cargo airplanes filled with gasoline and ammunition over the Himalaya Mountains to resupply the Flying Tigers and to aid the Chinese Government of Chiang Kai-shek in their struggle against the Japanese. The United States Army Air Forces called the action the "China Burma India (CBI) Theater and those who participated in this dangerous maneuver were said to be flying "the Hump," their name to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew from India to China .
In mid-December 1941, in the wake of Japan's massive land, sea and air offensive in the Far East and its attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allies needed to support China to keep it in the war. China's forces would tie down Japan on the mainland and provide bases for attacks on Japan. In any event and at all cost, General Claire Chennault's China Fir Task Force, the Flying Tigers, had to be supplied.
The CBI Theater of Operations officially began March 3, 1942. Americans had started flying The Hump in April, 1942. Dayne arrived in India in August, 1943. When the Japanese blocked the Burma Road and continuing until 1945 when the Ledo Road opened, Americans flew the Hump. For those whose memories don't extend that far back, the 1,100-mile Burma Road was built through three nations by Allied forces who endured disease, monsoons and Japanese attacks. For pictures of the Burma Road, turn to the National Geographic Magazine for November, 2003. A road from Ledo, Assam, India, was begun in late 1942. Ledo was chosen because it was close to the northern terminus of a rail line from the ports of Calcutta and Karachi. Construction of the Ledo Road was completed in early 1945.
Except for Mother telling her friends when a cherished letter would arrive from Dayne, CBI was not well known, staying out of the newspaper headlines in the United States. Losses there were similar to those in Europe or the Pacific. This forgotten theater of World War II was a 12,000 mile supply line, and often last to get supplies from the United States. CBI was critical to our war strategy. When Burma was occupied in 1942, Japanese forces cut the last supply line of communication between China and the outside world. CBI was necessary to keep China supplied and in the war until a land-supply route could be established.
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Pvt. Harry Dayne Kline was stationed at Chanute Field from the fall of 1943 until the spring of 1943. This picture was taken shortly before his promotion to Cpl. During World War II, the mess halls at Chanute Field served 75,000 meals per day. Following Pearl Harbor, Chanute transitioned from peace to war. Many soldiers were housed temporarily in large tents. Chanute's student load continued to grow until it reached a peak of 25,000 in January, 1943. At one time, an assignment to Chanute was a dire punishment. The phrase "Don't Shoot 'em, Chanute 'em" summed up the general perception of the installation. Chanute closed in 1993. |
Dayne was an engineer on a transport plane known as a C-87. During the war, an engineer in the sense that Dayne was an engineer made sure that oil, fuel and battery levels were where they should be, taking over from the crew chief for the flight. The flights carried loads of flammable fuel in barrels and a thousand or so pounds of ammunition from a base in Tezpur, India, to Kunming in Southern China. The airplanes were modified B-24s, known as a "Liberators," and carried a crew of four. Gun turrets were stripped out and the bomb bays were covered over.
CBI supported China by providing war materials and the manpower to get it to where it was needed. In addition to the effort Dayne was involved in--flying supplies over the hump from India to China--CBI included the Flying Tigers who fought the Japanese in the air over China and Burma. Merrill's Marauders and the Mars Task Force fought through the jungles of Burma. Army Engineers built the Ledo Road to open up the land supply route.
Let there be no question about it! Flying the Hump was risky business. The air route led first over the Himalayan foothills and finally to the mountains, between north Burma and west China, airspace where turbulence and abominable weather was the norm. Judge for yourself: one of the peaks they flew over translated into English as "Elephant Head Gouge Mountain," because "when elephants use a game trail on its side, at one place they have to turn such a sharp corner that their tusks scrape grooves into the rock."
Transport planes flew around the clock from thirteen bases in northeastern India, eventually landing at one of six Chinese airfields. Some crews flew as many as three round trips every day, although Dayne never flew that many missions in a day. Parts and supplies to keep the planes flying were scarce, and flight crews would have to trudge into the foothills to gather up the debris from previous crashes for parts to repair the remaining units in the squadron.
The route flown to China across the Himalayas resembled a "Camel’s Hump," somewhat like the silhouette of a camel's side. When the Japanese seized Burma and the Burma Road, the United States organized what was frequently called "an air bridge" built by transport aviation units of the American army and the air transport section of the Chinese Air Company.
In the west, the Camel’s Hump began in India and passed over the mountains of Yongnan and a series of spines to Sichuan Province in central-western China. The quantity of cargo transported reached 7,000 tons every month. The Chinese estimated that from May, 1942, to September, 1945, a total of 650,000 tons were transported over 1.5 million flight hours. Dayne often flew with Chinese soldiers, recruited "at the end of a gun," and transported for training outside of China. Dayne remembers that "we were young, but the Chinese were just boys."
The aerial flights continued until the end of the war, although it became less critical once the Ledo Road was opened, and with the recapture of Rangoon the re-opening of the Burma Road.
The flights were accompanied by large losses from bad weather, failures of equipment, and the attacks of Japanese fighters. Monthly losses reached 50% of aircraft flying along the route. The Army Air Force reported that more than 1,000 men died and over 600 planes crashed. Counting all operations, more than 2,000 aircraft were lost in the CBI, the majority of which were transports. Bullet holes in the sides of the planes were common. Weather forecasts for the CBI were unreliable and planes had no radar. Pilots would sneak into the clouds to avoid the Japanese, but those same clouds made flying more dangerous. One C-87 (a B-24 bomber converted into a cargo plane) crashed while flying the Hump over Tibet. Years later, the plane was found frozen in a glacier. One account of a ground-search party from 19 OCT 44 read simply "plane was completely burned from middle of fuselage to nose. Part of fuselage and nose were intact. Number on tail plainly visible. No signs of survivors."
The same ground-search party wrote an interesting account of cutting a trail through dense bamboo. About 10 one morning, a huge bull elephant blocked their path and they were forced to take shots with their carbines. Their journal noted, "We only wounded him. We were afraid he would charge in this enraged condition, so we searched hastily for cover. Amazingly, yet to our good fortune, he charged ahead of us and tore out a trail through the bamboo for over 5 miles. We would hide in the bamboo and he would turn and go a few hundred yards. We didn't dare shoot, because if he once saw us, we would have absolutely no cover. This went on until 1230 hrs. Finally, at this time he stopped in a clearing and turned to charge us. We all fired, scoring successful hits in the eyes and ear. He shook the earth as he toppled over. We stopped and took pictures, and then proceeded on our journey."
In Dayne's archives are letters from other members of the CBI, including one from William Robert Alcorn, Manchester, Tennessee, who put in 842 hours and made 85 hump flights as a radio operator. He recalled one flight with "continuous lightening" and was "tossed by the up and down drafts that I thought would take the wings off." He remembered his flights "smelling leaking gas" compounded by the fact that no radio calls could be made except at landing. The weather often made it impossible to see the terrain below, and maintenance men had to keep the planes on schedule with no spare parts. Work on the planes took place with no shelter from the rain, no lighting facilities for night work and no work stands. Flight crews had to learn to fly the hump on instruments with no navigational facilities available.
One of Dayne's happiest moments came when Bruce Sutliff, son of former Benton residents Doyle and Nell Sutliff, flew a plane to India as a pilot for American Airlines and was able to reunite with Dayne for a few hours. Bruce flew planes from the United States to India, and then returned to the United States to do it all over again.
The American Airlines Flagship News of February, 1944, told about Project 7-A, the code name for getting planes to India for use in the CBI, noted by American Airlines as their "greatest war assignment." This was the program for which Bruce Sutliff flew. American Airlines was asked to establish a base in India to fly supplies into China over "the Burma Road of the Air," a reference to the 28,000' high Himalayas. The company established Project A-7 within 24 hours of getting the word. By 4 AM on the sixth day of the project, leaders were in India opening their secret orders. By that night, the first operational plane was en route to India. The nonmilitary American Airlines team in India noted in their journal, "The monsoon season was at its height. The heat was intolerable. The camp was a mud hole, and the airport was little better." Runways flooded, and were lighted at first only by gasoline flares. Later, when the rains subsided, goats and Brahman cows grazed the airfield. A Jeep had to race down the airfields in advance of the launch of flights to scare off the critters. The animals often wandered in open doors of the barracks in the middle of the night. It took a couple of weeks before the full complement of C-87s assigned to the project arrived, but "it took just one day for every plane to get into action."
Richard Sutliff remembers that his cousin, Bruce, flew for American Airlines between Chicago and New York after the war. Richard tells us that "we had a shortwave radio and could hear the transmissions between LaGuardia and planes flying in and out of there. We knew Bruce's schedule and when it was a night flight, our family (in Central) would go outside and wait for Bruce to tip his landing lights as he flew over the farm! Pretty big stuff for a kid in grade school."
Leisure time was sometimes available with the passing of the rainy season. And baseball was popular, but no one ever went after a ball that went out of bounds because of poisonous snakes, against "whose venom no anti-toxin" had been found. Bathing was simple in the monsoon season. The airmen walked out into a downpour with a cake of soap, lathered from head to toe, and then stood there while a "river of rain rinsed you off." The system failed at times, when the hard rains would suddenly end during the soap cycle. Getting the natives to bath was another matter. They refused to remove their clothes. As many as eight castes of several different religions sometimes took more than a dozen natives just to serve breakfast, for some could handle only one kind of food and some another.
All the CBI personnel wore identifying insignia. Those who flew wore the flag of Free China on their back. Below it was the seal of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek which, translated, asked the Chinese to aid and protect the American who came to help China fight. On the arm was the insignia of the CBI wing.
Dayne remembers closely examining food before eating it. The canned food from England was usually good, but bread had to be held to the light to ferret out the bugs before it could be eaten.
We'll close for now, but try to imagine working on a plane without oxygen at 18,000 feet, talking with crews that had been on a plane that went down and found their way back thanks to aid provided by friendly Chinese, the heart-breaking wait for letters from Back Home in Benton, PA, and the disheartening wait for spare parts so that planes could fly, or trying to work with the thermometer hovering around 125° on the ground and below zero as they neared the top of the Hump, of men soaked to the skin before they could get their planes in the air.
Dayne's flying of the hump ended about the time that he came down with an ear infection, although he never reported his problem, fearing that it might keep him from getting discharged. Contrast that with today's world where if someone drinks a coffee that is too hot, someone gets sued! From that time until the end of the war, he worked in chemical services helping to send incendiaries to Japan.
Dayne's war years ended in October, 1945, after being assigned in Karachi, Pakistan, for five months. Today, Dayne doesn't know if any of his old buddies are still alive. He has lost touch with all of them. Some have flown in their Last Formation, many have just lost touch over the years. Regardless of their status, it was enlightening to sit with Dayne and listen to the wartime stories, whether funny, tragic or just hair raising, in the air or on the ground, combat or not. Many of these brave men are in their 80s and 90s today and have long since stopped telling their stories, a dim memory now. We felt that it was an important message to share from a man Back Home in Benton, PA.
A man by the name of Joe Whitford summed up the CBI on the day he left to come home. He wrote, "We shall probably forget the records we put on the books and the hours flown and the tonnage moved, but we shall never forget the fact that we stuck it out when the going got really tough. Only those who slipped through the mud and rain of the monsoon, or felt common sorrow in the loss of a fellow worker, or ate corn-willy and hot dogs, or jumped in the outdoor shower, or chased goats and cows out of the compound will really understand the common feeling binding all on this project."
